A bill that would essentially revive Portland’s sit-lie law died in an Oregon Senate committee last week.
That’s good news for people experiencing homelessness and free speech advocates around the state. In Portland, it’s far more complex.
The Portland Business Alliance was hoping the bill would clear the way to create stricter guidelines in Portland’s sidewalk ordinance. The city’s previous sit-lie policies have been ruled unconstitutional on three separate occasions. House Bill 2963 would have prohibited the state from preempting a city’s authority to control or regulate the sidewalks — something that played a key role in both appellate and circuit court rulings that struck down prior Portland sidewalk laws.
Where do we go from here?
For years, homeless youth, often called “road warriors,” have been at the epicenter of the Portland Business Alliance’s public policy efforts. Downtown businesses and some non-profits have deemed the street youth unreachable and a nuisance to the flow of traffic and to an overall friendly business and tourism climate in downtown.
The general public at times has become fed up with the number of “aggressive” panhandlers downtown. The Oregonian editorial board has written on many occasions about the confrontational behavior of the street youth and called for government to do something about it. Mayor Charlie Hales has signaled that panhandlers in Portland are one of his top priorities.
The failure of House Bill 2963 certainly puts a damper on those plans, but it certainly won’t stop them.
Street Roots believes that when there are bad actors in our public space, homeless or not, and they are breaking the law, law enforcement should arrest them. If someone’s being assaulted on the streets, there’s a law for that. If someone has an aggressive animal that’s threatening, or off leash, there’s a law for that too. Law enforcement should enforce those laws when necessary.
More so, if the city wants to curb bad behavior in public spaces, the city should dedicate more time and resources to mental health and homeless outreach workers and police walking the beat.
Homelessness in Portland’s downtown core is not going away. Oregon is experiencing a growing number of homeless youth in our school system and a recession that continues to punish the poor. It’s not realistic to think we can sweep people on the streets out of sight, out of mind.
Whatever the solutions are, they need to be met with innovative thinking and harm-reduction models. If we’ve learned anything over the past three decades with the criminalization of the poor, it’s that you can’t stop poverty with stricter laws that offer no real solutions to the problems.
The sidewalk issue is a quagmire. The sooner we can move on from this discussion and on to the larger issues our city and region face concerning poverty, the closer we will be to providing an opportunity for those asking for change on our streets corners.
